Cardinal Newman High School making leap to digital textbooks

As public school systems like the Palm Beach County School District struggle with the daunting goal of trying to transition their thousands of students away from paper textbooks and towards the electronic world of digital textbooks, one private school in the county is making an all out leap into the digital world next school year.

Cardinal Newman High School, a private school with less than 700 students in West Palm Beach, is requiring all of its students to either lease an iPad from the school or buy their own and bring it in to school next year.

Principal Christine Higgins said most textbooks materials used by students will be loaded onto the iPads digitally. A few paper textbooks recently purchased by the school will still be used by students, Higgins said, but will be phased out over the next few years and no more paper textbooks will be bought by the school.

“We definitely saw the advantage of the technology,” Higgins said of the school’s decision to go all out digital and require students to pay for their iPads. “These kids are all on some kind of device now. We need to be able to reach them how they learn.”

Higgins said the school did a pilot this year asking some students to bring their own devices in for digital textbooks to see how the school’s internet infrastructure would handle so many devices at once.

All incoming freshman will be required to lease an iPad from the school, which costs $250 per year. If an iPad is stolen or damaged it costs $50 to get a replacement leased tablet.

Students in higher grades can choose to lease or bring in their own iPad, which can cost at least $300 to purchase. Students who bring in their own iPad must also pay the school a $100 fee to use their own device for textbooks, according to an outline of the iPad program provided to parents on the school’s Web site.

Higgins said she expected that the vast majority of students would lease iPads from the school rather than buy their own. She said the school has also worked out a deal with Apple Computers where after three years the school can trade the leased iPads in for newer versions.

The Palm Beach County School District has also been looking at how to transition to digital textbooks. At a recent budget advisory committee meeting one of the volunteer members of the budget committee, Brian Crowley, talked about how the price of iPads was declining and asked why the district didn’t put more money into buying iPads for students or have them all bring in their own devices for digital textbooks.

Educational Technology Director Gary Weidenhamer said what Cardinal Newman idea was doing making all its student buy or lease iPads was not really practical in the public school district.

Not all students could afford to buy their own iPad, he said, and with more than 170,000 students the district does not have the money to buy iPads for every student. The district has used iPads in small pilot projects in some elementary schools, Weidenhamer said. But it has also found that some applications it needs to run for classes like industry certifications in high school career academy programs simply won’t work on an iPad.

If the district doesn’t mandate a specific iPad and allows students to purchase and bring in whatever device they can afford it could lead to situations where each student in the classroom brings in a different type of digital device with a different operating system, Weidenhamer said. Then the digital textbook materials the district is trying to get to the students might not load on every device students bring.

Higgins said students bringing in multiple different types of devices that didn’t all work with the textbook software was a problem that happened during the pilot program this year at Cardinal Newman. That was why the school decided to specifically mandate buying or leasing an iPad.

She said Cardinal Newman’s initiative is modeled after other private schools that have also taken the leap into digital textbooks by requiring students to buy their devices.